F7 glibc does not even boot when am_ET is enabled, but it's not
obvious why. Suffice to say that the output of ls comes out
sorted by strlen() when am_ET is enabled!!!

glibc-2.6 from F8 is ok, but I can't find an obvious patch to
backport. The only recent addition to the am_ET locale has
been to discard accents in string comparisons.

Moreover, the glibc-2.6 rpm post-install scriptlet fails silently
on jffs2, corrupting the locale archive. It happens because
the build-locale-archive tool tries to use a shared writable
file map which is not supported.

GTK contains an Amharic input method which is currently outdated.
I'm in contact with the author, Daniel Yacob, who'll soon port
his latest patch to the current version of GTK.
This probably means we'll have to fork the gtk2 package too.
I'm unable to tell how important these changes would be for users.

Lidet Tilahun, a professor of Ethiopian at Harvard, tried typing
on the XO with this IM and confirmed that this would be the
preferred method. It's basically CONSONANT+VOWEL, with a way
to switch in a CONSONANT-only mode.

Additionally, it seems this IM requires the "us" keyboard.
I couldn't get it to work with the "et" keyboard loaded.
Daniel says it shouldn't happen.